Endurance racing is all about time.
It can be your best friend or your worst enemy, and sometimes both within the same race.
It can make or break a strategy. It can show how nail-bitingly close or frustratingly far you came from that next position or, in a championship series, a few more valuable points.
And unlike even the closest opponent or fastest prototype coming up to lap you, time is always there. Always ticking. Always simultaneously staring you right in the face and breathing down your neck.
The best endurance drivers are those who can withstand the test of time, being patient enough, fast enough, and consistent enough to survive and succeed.
Drivers who fail often fall victim to their own mistakes — pushing too hard, for too long, or in the wrong places — or are unwittingly caught up in the mistakes of others. Over time, that sort of bad luck is bound to plague everyone.
In my first endurance racing season, though, it seemed that bad luck was unfairly targeting me and my KRT Motorsport team. In the first four races of the NEO Endurance Series, we gave up positions and points due to computer problems, software glitches in iRacing’s then-nascent driver swap code, and penalties. Our frustrations could have been measured by the time lost to those issues.
Despite having a decent pace and comfort behind the wheel of our Ruf C-Spec, we didn’t have the results to show for it. Our best finish was fifth in the season opener at Sebring, and that came after a faulty modem caused me to lose connection to the server on the first lap of my first stint.
Entering the final race of the season, we were outside the top eight in points — a critical cutoff that determined whether teams would automatically qualify for the following season or have to endure the difficult pre-qualifying format — and quickly running out of time to do anything about it.
My teammate Karl and I knew it would practically take an all-or-nothing effort in the finale at Road Atlanta, with at least a podium as well as some bad luck for our closest competitors.
Determined to uphold our part of that equation and let the rest of the chips fall where they may, we made the most of our last chance and finished with a result better than we ever expected.
Like capturing time in a bottle, it’s a come-from-behind story I won’t soon forget. This is the greatest drive of my sim racing career.
1. NEO Endurance Series at Road Atlanta (Mar. 15, 2015)
Time offers a chance for recovery. For preparation. But only if you use it wisely.
All too often in my years of endurance racing, I’ve let that time slip away. Sometimes, I’ve kept my racing schedule too full, balancing multiple leagues and driving several different cars that were tough to consistently jump between.
That was the case in NEO season 1, as I was running in that championship and another, the Masters of Endurance Series, on top of my ongoing oval racing career. With so much going on, time to practice simply slipped away.
In other cases, I’ve eschewed the workman-like task of practice for more glamorous official races or simply taking a break from the sometimes-draining world of sim racing.
Whatever the case, I’m usually never able to meet my pre-race practice goals, whether it’s testing and tweaking setups in different weather conditions, running multiple full stints on a dynamic track, or getting experience in traffic.
I wouldn’t make the same mistake leading into the season finale. Or, rather, I couldn’t. Our team’s fate depended on me being more prepared for this race than any I’d run all season, or perhaps in my entire sim racing career.
It would take an aggressive approach, but Karl and I were up to the challenge. In the days after the previous round, he “vow[ed] to double [his] preparations for that race”.
It wasn’t as simple as getting a setup ready. A new iRacing build would drop the week before the race, and Karl and I debated just how much work we should put in beforehand in case the C-Spec received major changes.
He argued that we should at least get a basic setup ready, and I’m glad he did, because when the build arrived and the physics updates were fairly minor, we only needed to make a few tweaks. Plus, we had both put in a dozens or even hundreds of laps around the track by then, so it certainly wasn’t a waste of time.
The week before a NEO race always feels a bit like cramming for a final exam, and in most cases, I constantly worry I haven’t done enough preparation and I’ll be embarrassed by my own performance compared to my competitors.
The lead-up to the Road Atlanta race was still busy, but in this case, Karl and I both felt prepared. We had done enough testing to have a solid handle on our pit and fuel strategy — something that we realized other teams obviously hadn’t done during the race itself.
We had also both put in several long runs, and Karl had staked out our competitors occupying that eighth-place position in the standings — one spot ahead of us — to see how we fared.
“I must say, we are looking good,” he said, noting their slower pace and frequent practice crashes. “All we need is to not screw up and beating them shouldn’t be too much of a problem.”
But just beating one team probably wouldn’t be enough. Another team behind us in the standings brought in a ringer for the race — a driver who wasn’t on their team but was one of the top GT drivers on the iRacing service. With him in the car, they could easily leapfrog us in points.
So we kept preparing and kept tuning. On the Thursday night before the race, we were debating the most minor damper changes in search of the last bit of mid-corner rotation and on-throttle stability.
It’s the most prepared I’ve ever felt for a race, and it showed in our pace. We were lapping within a tenth of each other, so it seemed we were getting the most out of the setup.
“I hope that means we’re both running at a good pro driver pace,” I commented.
We wouldn’t know for sure until the race weekend began and it was time to perform.
Qualifying is the ultimate test of time. It’s a race against the clock that doesn’t single-handedly decide your fate but can do an awful lot to influence it.
We had been consistent mid-pack qualifiers all season, but that wouldn’t be good enough in this race. At the short Road Atlanta circuit, the threat of an incident would be greatest in the middle of the field. Getting ahead of any potential carnage, as well as a few of our challengers, would help our chances of surviving, if not succeeding.
The first NEO season allocated an hour for each class to qualify on Saturday, and with so much time available and a mostly empty track to run on, it took a nearly perfect lap to post a top time.
Throughout the session at Road Atlanta, Karl and I took turns behind the wheel. Entering the final 30 minutes, he had recorded a time that was good enough for sixth place, but we both felt there was more pace in the car.
For my final run, I made a seemingly unorthodox setup adjustment. I added a click of wing to the car, figuring it could help find enough speed in the twisty first part of the lap to offset any losses down the two long straightaways.
Making use of that extra downforce would require pushing harder than I had in all of my practice runs and not making a single mistake. Halfway through my lap, I knew I was on pace to set a good time, and coming through the final chicane, I was physically trembling.
I crossed the line 0.118 seconds quicker than Karl’s best lap, moving us up to fifth on the grid — a position that held up in the closing minutes of qualifying while I was still shaking from my pressure-packed performance.
It wasn’t enough to match the alien-like pace of the top teams, but as a mere mortal sim racer, it was a timely performance that may be the best single lap I’ve ever driven. However, Karl and I both knew it would take six hours of equally mistake-free driving on Sunday before our fate would be secured.
Race day was all about making the best use of our time: going as fast as possible, limiting our losses in traffic, and spending as little time as possible on pit road.
We felt good about the former and the latter. We were both comfortable and quick with our setup, and we had a straightforward plan for a seven-stop race, figuring that saving enough fuel to make it on six wasn’t worth the risk.
But our other challenge, and potentially a make-or-break element of the race, would be traffic. At this track, prototypes would come through early and often, and we knew many drivers wouldn’t be too patient with the slower C-Specs through the narrow esses.
Staying as close to the front as possible would be crucial, and Karl wasted no time moving up even more at the start of the race. As we took the green flag, he made a pass for fourth, and once faster traffic arrived, the gap behind us kept growing.
As a crew chief, spotter, and spectator, time seemed to pass both satisfyingly quickly due to the constant action on track and excruciatingly slowly since there was still so much time — and so many encounters in traffic, especially for me — remaining in the race.
After Karl’s hectic single stint to start, it was my turn to get behind the wheel for a double. With more than ten seconds separating us from the cars in front of and behind us, I didn’t drop into a close battle, so my main job was to hold position.
It wouldn’t be easy, as the car behind us — fielded by our current team, SRN Motorsports — had finished on the podium multiple times that season, and their fastest driver Steve was still driving.
Today, he’s routinely a half-second faster than me even on my best days, but in that Road Atlanta race, I managed to match or even exceed his lap times, slightly increasing our gap to 15 seconds before the next round of pit stops.
Even with our stellar pace, it seemed that catching any of the top three teams would be tough. However, when Karl got back in, we caught a break. The same team ahead of us who employed a GT ringer for this race also had a slower driver in their lineup, and making matters worse for him, they inexplicably asked him to start saving fuel midway through his first stint.
Consistently lapping a second quicker than him, Karl ate up his advantage and passed him just shy of the race’s halfway point.
We were in podium position, but it was far from finished.
Our biggest scare of the race came 12 laps later. Karl was caught behind a slower C-Spec, and the class leader was quickly closing in on him. In the slow-speed turn 7 leading onto the backstretch, we got a bump from behind, and that was only the warning shot.
At the end of the straightaway, Karl ran a bit wide to avoid a collision ahead, and instead, he got divebombed by the leader in a move that driver later admitted was overly ambitious and borne out of frustration with being stuck in traffic — one of those all-too-frequent endurance racing deal-breakers.
Despite the shot across our port side, our ship was still sailing smoothly. Karl found his pace again, and to help our cause, the eighth-place team in the standings crashed while racing for position. Karl’s observation of them from practice felt prophetic, and it was certainly profitable for us.
Feeling more optimistic as Karl finished his double stint, I got back in the car for what ended up being the run to the checkered flag.
Those final three stints taking up two hours and change were my best of the race, and perhaps my best ever. I was matching Karl’s pace, but it didn’t feel like I was pushing. Instead, it seemed effortless. My practice and preparation had truly paid off.
Traffic was still stressful at times, but by the end, I felt like I had even mastered that aspect — at least enough to make in-race jokes about the same purple prototype who consistently got stuck following me through the esses.
As in my first two stints, I didn’t face any close battles, but I didn’t need any either. Our position had been earned through six hours of solid driving at the expense of other teams’ inconsistent pace and strategic missteps.
We were aided by a few on-track incidents as well, the most consequential of which came with an hour to go. The second-place team was twelve seconds ahead and I was only slowly gaining on them, but when they spun all by themselves out of turn 7 and nosed into the wall, that gap suddenly vanished.
That made the final hour of the race feel like one big victory lap, even though we were only in second. That’s not to say I let up on my pace. In fact, I ran one of my fastest laps of the race with just three laps to go.
But driving that quickly never felt risky. Our car was connected to the road, and Karl and I both had so much confidence that we never worried either of us would endanger our chances.
Our six hours of racing — the business-like approach at the start, the mid-race scare followed by the realization that things were working out for us, and the jubilation in the final stints — was all building to the moment we crossed the finish line.
As the clock ran out, it was as if time stood still.
We were second in the race and fifth in the standings, wildly exceeding even our most optimistic expectations.
In the minutes after the checkered flag waved, Karl and I couldn’t quite find the words to express our emotions. Those came days later.
“I would say everything went exactly to plan, but I never planned or dreamed of running as well as we did!” I told him.
“I think this was our best race in terms of preparation, planning, and execution, but I couldn’t have imagined anything like a second place,” he said, reflecting my own amazement.
“I’m really happy that we managed to stumble over each other in the vastness of cyberspace,” he added, also echoing my gratefulness toward a talented teammate who made this moment happen.
In a season and an endurance career that had started with so much frustration, we had finally broken through with a good result, and we saved our best for last.
Like endurance racing itself, it was about time.